Teaching Setting? 12 High School Short Stories to Use
If we’re honest, we rarely prioritized setting when looking for high school short stories to use in our classrooms. This…
Literary Devices
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Teaching with Short Stories: Your Helpful All-in-One Guide
Updated: September 05, 2026 Hunting men for sport. Kissing (steamily) a handsome pilot who doesn’t write when he says he…
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Why Teaching About Plot in High School is Still Important
We don’t know about you, but we had some questions about teaching about plot as high school teachers. Should we…
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Short Stories for High School: Focus on Irony
Irony can be a lot of fun to teach, but it can also be really challenging for students to wrap their minds around. It’s important for all students to understand, though, because it forms the basis for large swaths of our popular culture, and unlike other literary devices, when we misunderstand (or miss altogether) an author’s use of irony, we run the risk of taking away the opposite meaning than the one the author intended.
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Short Stories for High School: Focus on Characterization
Characterization is one of the most important literary devices you can focus on when you read short stories with your students. Really, at its heart, characterization is the point of literature. Whether we’re reading to escape, to learn, to feel, or to experience, well-developed characters are essential.
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Short Stories for High School: Focus on Plot Structure
Rather than selecting short stories for high school students that confirm their understanding of plot structure, suspense, and foreshadowing, we found it most effective to challenge students’ assumptions with short stories in which an author’s use of an unusual plot structure directly contributes to our understanding of the work’s theme, as it leads to meaningful discussions and revelations.
